My body fades. Seconds becoming an eternal twilight, everything slowed, everything so pointless and poignant as I see how ridiculous our human strength is in the end. Take us from our bubbles of life, and what are we? The metal towers around us look carved of ice. The lights and flashing HC screens like the scales of dragons frozen inside them.
Mars is over our heads, consuming and omnipotent. But in Phobos’s fast rotation, we’re already nearing a place on the planet where dawn comes and light carves a crescent into the darkness. Molten wounds still glow where the two nuclear bombs detonated. And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.
—
I’m blind.
I wake on metal. Feel plastic against my face. Gasping around me. Bodies moving. The coldness of a shuttle engine rumbling under the deck. My body seizes and shivers. I suck down the oxygen. It feels like my head has caved in. The pain is everywhere and fading with each pulse of my heart. My fingers are their normal size. I rub them together, trying to orient myself. I’m shivering, but there’s a thermal blanket on me, unsentimental hands rubbing me to promote circulation. To my left, I hear Pebble calling for Clown. We’ll all be blind for several minutes as our optic nerves recalibrate. He answers her groggily and she nearly breaks down crying.
“Victra!” Sevro’s slurring. “Wake up. Wake up.” Gear rattles as he shakes her. “Wake up!” He slaps her face. She wakes with a gasp.
“…the hell. Did you just hit me?”
“I thought…”
She slaps him back.
“Who is that?” I ask the hands that rub my shoulders through the blanket.
“Holiday, sir. We scooped you popsicles up four minutes ago.”
“How long…How long were we out there?”
“ ’Bout two minutes, thirty seconds. It was a shitshow. We had to empty the cargo bay and have the pilot fly backward into you, then pressurize it on the fly. These carrots can’t soldier, but they can damn well steer garbage ships. Still, if you hadn’t been linked, most of you would be dead as lead. There’s rubble and corpses floating around the sector now. HC crews crawling everywhere.”
“Ragnar?” I ask fearfully, not having heard him yet.
“I am here, my friend. The Abyss will not claim us yet.” He begins to laugh. “Not just yet.”
We’re in trouble, and Sevro knows it. Seizing command back from me as soon as we land in the dilapidated docking berth of a Sons of Ares safe house deep in industrial sector, he orders the still-unconscious Matteo and Quicksilver to the infirmary to be woken up, Kavax to a cell, and tells Rollo and the Sons to prepare for an assault. The Sons stare at us, dumbstruck. Our Obsidian disguises are obliterated. Particularly mine. The prosthetics on my face have fallen off in the battle. Contacts sucked off in the vacuum. Black hair dye thinned out from sweat. Still got my gloves, though. But these Sons don’t look at a pack of Obsidians now. They’re staring at a cadre of Golds, an Obsidian, a Gray, and at least one ghost.
“The Reaper…,” someone whispers.
“Keep your mouth shut,” Clown snaps. “Not a word to anyone.”
Whatever he says, soon the rumor will spread among them. The Reaper lives. Whatever the effect it’ll have, it’s not the right time. We may have avoided police pursuit, but such a high-profile kidnapping, not to mention the assassination of two high-level Peerless, will ensure that the full analytical weight of the Jackal’s counterterrorism units is brought to bear on the evidence. Praetorian and Securitas antiterrorism tech squads will already be poring over the footage of the attack. They’ll discover how we gained access to the facility, how we made our escape, and who our likely compatriots were. Every weapon, piece of equipment, ship used will be traced to its source. Society reprisals against lowColors throughout the station will be swift and brutal.
And when they analyze the visual evidence of our little vacuum escape, they’ll see my face and Sevro’s. Then Jackal himself will come, or he’ll send Antonia or Lilath to hunt me down with their Boneriders.
The clock’s ticking.
